Hold Congress Accountable

About FreedomConnector

Find activists, groups, and events right in your own neighborhood. Join FreedomConnector to get involved and learn more about key issues threatening our economic freedom. Whether you’re looking for like-minded people, trying to boost your existing group’s impact, or simply trying to stay up on current events, FreedomConnector is the place to start. See what’s happening in your state today!

Search FreedomWorks

Resources

Key Vote

Key Vote NO on the House Farm Bill

As one of our millions of FreedomWorks members nationwide, I urge you to contact your representative and urge him or her to vote NO on H.R. 1947, the Federal Agriculture Reform and Risk Management (FARRM) Act. Although this bill is popularly known as the “Farm Bill”, eighty percent of the bill’s spending goes to food stamps, and much of the rest goes to subsidize large farm corporations at the expense of small family farms.

The first and most obvious reason to oppose this bill is that it spends close to a trillion dollars over ten years. Although the Congressional Budget Office has scored this House version of the bill at $939 billion, past farm bills have always greatly exceeded their cost analysis, and this one will certainly do so.

The “Farm Bill” is a misnomer for a bill which is 80 percent food stamps. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (or SNAP, the government name for food stamps) has increased its enrollment over 70 percent just since 2008, and now accounts for over $800 billion in spending over ten years. Riddled with inefficiencies and fraud, the SNAP program desperately needs structural reform. Instead, it is tucked away in the farm bill, as an $800 billion earmark used to get urban Democrats to vote for the agricultural subsidies in the rest of the bill.

Finally on top of all the corporate welfare in the farm bill already, Republicans in the House have piled on a brand new entitlement program, shallow loss crop insurance. This new program would give farmers, who already receive massive subsidies on insurance coverage for catastrophic crop loss, more subsidies to protect against just making less revenue than the previous several years’ average. This essentially locks farmers into the current record-high revenues for years, even after crops inevitably fall back to average price levels.

I urge you to call your representative and ask him or her to vote NO on the farm bill, H.R. 1947. We will count their vote as a KEY VOTE when calculating the FreedomWorks Economic Freedom Scorecard for 2013. The Scorecard is used to determine eligibility for the FreedomFighter Award, which recognizes Members of Congress with voting records that support economic freedom.

Last weekend, the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) met in Washington, DC to address the most important issues in America. Everybody who attended was well aware that free markets in America have been under assault by the federal government’s crony relationships with private corporations.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce the National Association of Manufacturers have organized a coalition representing some 700 business leaders to fly-in to Washington DC this week to lobby members of Congress to reauthorize the crony Export-Import Bank before June 30, when its current authorization expires.

When the House of Representatives passed the farm bill earlier this year, Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) hailed it as a accomplishment because, he said, it "maintains critical assistance for families in need and improves programs for producers while cutting the cost of government."

The Obama administration is the most open and transparent administration in history.....said no serious person, EVER. Though the line is still repeated ad nauseam by White House and administration officials, it has been thoroughly debunked time and time again. But it seems that the administration isn't just trying to provide cover for itself anymore. They're also now trying to run interference for North Carolina Democrat Kay Hagan.

As one of our more than 6 million FreedomWorks members nationwide, I urge you to contact your representative and your senators today and urge them to support the Export-Import Bank Termination Act, H.R. 2263 and S.1102, and to co-sponsor the bill if they have not already done so.

Democracy and Power 110: Majority Leader of the Senate and the Speaker of the HouseThe first vote in a legislative session is the most important. The Senate and the House of Representatives vote for their respective leaders. The leadership positions are consistently decided by which party has the majority.

Fearing baldness, I long ago stopped scratching my head at the public moves of the Republican hierarchy. With Obamacare crumbling like a celebrity marriage all around them, the Democrats are so desperate that they're focusing on raising the minimum wage-a "feel good" bunch of nonsense that benefits an age demographic that isn't even old enough to vote for them. But they need people to talk about anything but Obamacare.

As one of our millions of FreedomWorks members nationwide, I urge you to contact your senators and ask that they vote NO on cloture for the Farm Bill conference report, H.R. 2462. This final agreement reached between the House and Senate actually manages to be worse than the bills passed by each chamber separately, and does nothing to contain the hundreds of billions in spending on corporate welfare for farm corporations and an out-of-control food stamp program.